Allied retreat

The author Patrick Bishop found peace restoring an old farmhouse in Normandy, but war was never far from his mind. As he sells up on the 70th anniversary of D-Day, he reflects on how the past lingers in this idyllic corner of France

Slideshow: Le Clos Fontaine

Bishop fell for the Cotentin peninsula and bought Le Clos Fontaine as a base for family holidays (Rieger Bertrand)

After spending six weeks with the Parachute Regiment in Afghanistan in the
summer of 2008 researching a book, I needed a holiday. I headed across the
Channel with wife and child for an impromptu break. Compared with the
sun-blasted lunar deserts and fetid, Taliban-infested river valleys of
Helmand, the soft hills, mellow stone manor houses and vast, breezy beaches
of Calvados and the Cherbourg Peninsula felt like balm to the soul.

A lifelong Francophile who’d lived in Paris, I had always had a hankering for
a place in the country. My wife, Henrietta, rather hesitantly indulged me.
Initially we looked down south, in Ariège and Hautes-Pyrénées. The houses
were handsome and good value and the countryside spectacular — and you could
bank on summer sunshine.

But we both liked the sea and it felt a long way inland and a long way to go.
Crucially, there did not seem a great